Structural analysis in control systems design of hydraulic drives

The design of hydraulic control systems is a complex and time-consuming task that, at the moment, cannot be automated completely. Nevertheless, important design subtasks like simulation or control concept selection can be efficiently supported by a computer. Prerequisite for a successful support is a well-founded analysis of a hydraulic system's structure. This paper provides a systematics for analyzing a hydraulic system at different structural levels and illustrates how structural information can be used within the design process. Another important point of this paper is the automatic extraction of structural information from a circuit diagram by means of graph-theoretical investigations.